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Unity 8, Mir To Be Experimental Choice In Ubuntu 13.10

05-16-2013, 11:20 AM

Phoronix: Unity 8, Mir To Be Experimental Choice In Ubuntu 13.10

For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical's next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October...

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Even if it's buggy, it seems like we'll have a lot fewer design bugs than the rest of the stack. Or maybe we're just creating more- we'll see.

What I'm really interested to see is how traditional apps integrate with the new Unity, and whether the GTK theme will be reworked. I'm guessing the indicators will be the same, but we'll add a global menubar when docked.

As annoying as it is that everything is becoming so fragmented from a design perspective, it's still pretty amazing how many awesome things are coming from the Linux ecosystem. It makes Windows 8 seem rather boring.

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Can they say if Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu will exist at 14.04 and how it will be handled? X.org or will they make those workoning on Mir on their own?

I think there's some FUD about the impending doom of the various *buntus. Writing distro-specific patches to enable KDE / Xfce / LXDE to run on top of Mir is beyond the resources available to the *buntus, but there are several potential solutions besides that route that should ensure the *buntus continue to survive.

First, as you yourself point out, the traditional X server should still be available. That's a safe, reliable fallback in case no other alternatives materialize. Next, since everyone is so sure Wayland is going to be ready for desktop computer usage before Mir is, what's to keep Ubuntu from shipping Wayland in its repositories, and therefore making it readily available to the *buntus to build upon? And even if Ubuntu doesn't ship Wayland in the repos, what is there to prohibit the *buntus from packaging it themselves? And finally, there's also the possibility of a Wayland-Mir compatibility layer.

For a more fun exercise, try to imagine what it will look like if Ubuntu actually ships a desktop-ready Wayland before they ship a desktop-ready Mir. It can happen, completely unintentionally. Ubuntu gets over 90% of its packages from Debian unstable. Since Wayland is ahead of Mir in development already, and since Mir is being targeted towards mobile first, there's a good chance there's going to be a bit of a gap between Wayland's and Mir's general releases for traditional desktop systems. If enough of this gap occurs outside the Debian 8 (Jessie) freeze, there's a good chance an out-of-the-box functional Wayland will get packaged in Debian. What will Ubuntu do when it's time to re-sync with Debian unstable?

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As annoying as it is that everything is becoming so fragmented from a design perspective, it's still pretty amazing how many awesome things are coming from the Linux ecosystem. It makes Windows 8 seem rather boring.

Ain't that the truth. Hell, that's something I regarded as one of the disadvantages of the proprietary NVIDIA/ATI drivers: you are just a passive end user. With open source, I've watched Radeon framerates in Scorched3d quadruple in a year, part of it from upstream, part from configuring it right. Try THAT with a proprietary driver.

Windows 8, like GNOME and Ubuntu, has gotten into trouble with the desktop/tablet mismatch. Unlike us, it's "take it or leave it." Here, fragmentation is a nuisance but hardly new. The other side of fragmentation is variety and a smorgasboard of options. If you are working on something and like QT's tools, use them, you won't lock out GNOME users. The reverse is also true. We've lived with the GNOME/KDE divide and you can run anything from either side of the house on the other. That's the one thing we do need to keep, so compatability layers are going to be important. A possible ugliness
will be that very graphically demanding applications might need to run in their native environment for maximum performance.

Other than that issue, we are getting a choice of three display servers, at least five "modern" DE's plus dozens of lightweight ones. It should be possible for a distro-or a hacker-to pretty much set up any desired desktop for any class of device. UbuntuStudio (or whatever it evolves into) running
on a big multicore won't and should not look like Ubuntu Touch running on a smartphone, but the packages will exist to build either, so long as library incompatabilies, etc are carefully avoided.

I for one am looking forward to Cinnamon,(based on gnome-shell) getting ported to Wayland. Unity on Mir and Gnome-shell and Cinnamon on Wayland might take the "heavy" and the "slow" out of all these DE's once and for all. That will get Linux as a whole past our "Vista Moment."

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First, as you yourself point out, the traditional X server should still be available. That's a safe, reliable fallback in case no other alternatives materialize. Next, since everyone is so sure Wayland is going to be ready for desktop computer usage before Mir is, what's to keep Ubuntu from shipping Wayland in its repositories, and therefore making it readily available to the *buntus to build upon? And even if Ubuntu doesn't ship Wayland in the repos, what is there to prohibit the *buntus from packaging it themselves?

There is the question of their graphics stack. It has to support Wayland. If they patch it to only support Mir, then that would require the other *buntu groups to maintain their own stack.